Thursday, October 18, 2012

Reading other people's mail

I said this in a comment to another gun violence activist:

I have an interesting theory on the Heller-McDonald cases which makes them far more beneficial for the gun violence side than gun rights. I still don't like them even if they do result in strong gun control measures being enacted. They are unconstitutional and violate the rule of law no matter how you cut it.

Of course, most of you are too ignorant to know what hit you.

That especially goes for the Oik who likes to boast about stuff covered in A Levels: Hard a serious academic.

12 comments:

Laci, we've debated the Heller and McDonald rulings before. You've said in the past that they allow increased restrictions on gun ownership. What you fail to note is that they don't require such restrictions. You also fail to notice that Congress has no intention of passing the kind of laws that you want.

But in this comment, you are acting like the drunk guy at the end of the bar who hints that he knows all kinds of things about UFOs at Roswell and so forth, but won't go into any detail.

It depresses me that some still cling to the rather antiquated belief that the State is empowered to grant or deny the "privilege" to exercise ones most fundamental liberties.

Those who hold such views seek to justify them and adorn them with validating lies, (such as the one who goes by "Laci" or "E.N.", which I would suppose now holds similar connotations to "megalomaniac" or "personally inadequate internet troll") such as the one alluded to in Laci/E.N.'s diatribe above, the belief that the constitution provides no right to posses firearms, or such a right exists, but it is endowed to non-individual entities such as a "Militia", or the rather erroneous claim that the Constitution, the document conceived to protect individual freedom from the tyranny of the collective, establishes some "right to disarmament" or another ludicrous claim. It is simply insulting that our multi-personality afflicted canine friend, expects such blatant and contrived lies to pass as factual, legal theory, and not as politically motivated tyrant-empowering sedition and cultural vandalism.

Dog Gone, look at what you just said. We should read philosophy on the origin of rights. But we do. We just accept the conclusions of different philosophers. You are doing exactly the same thing that you accuse us of doing. You take one set of philosophers as speaking the truth. That's your choice. But you should understand that philosophy isn't like science. Science accumulates facts and theories and gets closer and closer to actual nature over time. Philosophy, by contrast, seeks to explain what reality means, but that's as much based on values and interpretations as on facts and logic.

Our claim is that human beings are sentient creatures with the ability to choose. The best way to organize societies is to allow everyone to make choices, so long as those choices don't harm innocent persons. The vast majority of us gun owners hurt no one.

Their arguments are not about ideas or what is a reasonable solution to society's ills, they are about control. They do not (with a few exceptions such as Mike) debate on facts or philosophy, but instead demand the total subjugation of the individual, to (what the perceive as) the collective interest. If anyone has the audacity to disagree with them, they typically become dogmatic, preferring the insult over facts and numbers.

The actual impact of firearms proliferation on public safety doesn't matter to most gun control advocates. They seek to destroy something that they find objectionable or offensive, regardless of the fact that most gun owners are decent and peaceful members of society. In their eyes they are simply targets for senseless and indiscriminate demonetization.

Exactly so, I-A-N. Dog Gone swoops in and blithers about how we know nothing and can't think, but when she's shown that the opposite is true, she disappears. I've yet to see her address a specific point that I've raised about rights, about critical thinking, or about the facts of gun violence.

Something else to notice here: Laci calls his position the gun-violence side. That sounds right to me. Control freaks like gun violence. They hope that the people will call for more control out of fear. That hasn't worked lately, but the control freaks do keep trying.

Many countries, having enacted prohibitive firearms policy, have seen absolutely no reduction in violent crime. There is absolutely no correlation between statutes regulating and penalizing the possession and proliferation of firearms by law abiding civilians. Take several nations including Libya, China (both mainland and Formosa), Kuwait, and Cambodia. Not exactly havens of peace.

Compare the rates of intentional homicide in South Africa and the Czech Republic. South Africa has gun laws much like Britain's, but it's murder rate is almost eight times ours. The Czech Republic's gun laws resemble ours, and it's murder rate is a quarter of ours. Here in our country, there's no correlation between the strictness of the gun laws and the rates of violent crime. Violence is strongly correlated with population density.

Dog Gone, you have chosen one answer for everything, but the world is more complex than you understand.

Actually the gun laws in South Africa may be considered to be more restrictive than situation that exists in mainland Britain. In South Africa, although handguns and center fire semi-automatic rifles are not outright prohibited, it is virtually impossible to attain the restrictive endorsement necessary to lawfully acquire them. Also, unlike Britain, the South African authorities seldom issue firearm licences to anyone, especially black citizens (only about 3% of black applicants are successful in obtaining a licence). In Britain, it is at least possible to obtain a Shotgun/Firearms licence in a reasonable amount of time, unlike in South Africa, where it may take decades and thousands of dollars. Also, the British authorities charged with the issuance of licences don't openly request a bribe.

This is the result of simple people (much like Dog Gone) seeking simple answers to problems which they are incapable of fully appreciating. Violence is an inherently human problem, it had existed before the offensive pieces of steel where first conceived of.